I'm Scott, I'm Russell, and I'm Leo.
This is Spitball.
Welcome to Spitball, the Pitchin' Kitchen, where three gadget gurus empty
our heads of startup and tech product ideas that we have stuck up in there.
So you can all have them for free.
Anything that we say is yours to keep.
And this week I brought our guests.
Uh, this week we have, uh, my friend, my colleague, former intern, but not.
He left us for another department.
Please welcome my friend, Sander.
Hello.
Happy to be here.
Applause.
Thunderous.
This is going to be a lot of fun.
And this week, not only do we have a fourth guest, but we have a fifth as well.
Um, we do.
I, a new friend of the show, Ruben Rabasa, who you may know from, I think
you should leave, uh, the sketch where the weird steering wheel don't
fly off and go out the window.
Uh, he has his own idea that we're going to be discussing
today for a tech product.
Are you serious?
So let's give that a listen and then we will discuss.
I'm serious.
It's about time.
That's amazing.
Many celebrities are submitting their ideas.
This is the first of many.
Hello, Scott.
Hello, Russell.
Hello, Leo.
It is me, the man with great ideas and your friend, Ruben Rabasa.
First of all, I love the name and the idea of your podcast.
And trust me, I know a good idea when I hear one.
I have a couple of ideas for an app.
I think there should be an app where two or more friends can listen to the
music at the same time in their headphones.
Okay.
And maybe even be able to talk between themselves.
Oh, wow.
That sounds good.
And I also think there should be an app to make Paul shut up.
Oh my God.
I hope that none of you is steering will fly off the
window while you're driving.
Okay.
So bye now.
And please, please don't ever, ever forget about me.
I love you.
All of you.
Bye now.
So thank you for your message, Ruben.
That was delightful.
So we, uh, I did a little bit of research.
There isn't really like a, of standalone app that does this, right?
So you, you have two or more people who are synchronized listening and maybe
even discussing at the same time.
Apple's FaceTime does have what they call share play now, where you can be on a
FaceTime call and like start up Netflix and it syncs up or start up Spotify.
I don't know if Spotify has support for that yet, but that could be an option.
But other than that, a lot of these are like a desktop app where you're all
taking turns, adding something to the queue or like your group message, managing
a queue of like a device in a room or something.
I don't know about like discord, but for this, there was a discord app that did
this until it got shut down by someone.
I can't remember what it's called, but I know I used it where you can be in the
discord call and you can add things to the queue and you all had to have the
same, you know, it was a bot, I think.
And it would pretend to be a user that would like pop into the voice channel.
And they were always a little bit hacky playing from YouTube or whatever.
I use those too.
Dude, this is like silent disco mode.
So like you can just turn it on and everybody in the room can listen to the
same stuff.
That'd be dope.
It is crazy that silent discos.
So, uh, Hope College where we work still has one every once in a while, which is
fun, but they use like giant headphones and radio FM transmitters and stuff.
It does seem like something that should be dragged to the modern age where anyone
can just kind of do it.
Right.
It's just, what do you, I don't even know how hard, this doesn't seem like a hard
thing to do.
It's just like Chromecast, but you send out the link to everybody at the same time.
Right.
Spotify even has a group like jam management system.
They just don't have called Spotify jams.
Whenever you connect to a Bluetooth speaker, it's now on by default, much to
everyone's embarrassment.
So then you can like go on someone else's phone and add something to the queue that
is, or is not maybe appropriate.
Like this show.
Fitball.show.
New feature.
You go around public places.
Five gigahertz.
Force other people's.
Five gigahertz.
Thanks.
I'm a fan.
Deep, deep, deep cut to episode six.
I was thinking the same thing, Sander.
Yeah.
I'm surprised.
Like this could work for YouTube videos.
This would work great on like a plane.
Right.
When you're trying to watch the same show.
Right.
It's like tele party, but better.
That's another extension thing that does sort of this, but it's not great.
Tele party.
Yeah.
It used to be called Netflix party.
It yeah.
Yeah.
The Chrome extension that allows you to watch Netflix prime video YouTube at the
same time, but it doesn't do it for music.
I think so.
Another thing in this genre.
It does seem like the airplane idea.
Like, why is it that you can't like vote consensus on a plane and then half the
plane or more watches the same thing?
And you can have like a little discussion about it afterward.
You're all trapped in a tube together.
Wouldn't that be kind of fun?
It's like an introvert's nightmare.
Not like physical discussion.
Well, I guess you could do like voice.
I guess I meant more foruming.
Not only do I not get to choose what I get to watch, but I have to talk about it
afterwards.
You guys remember planes used to just be like, you'd have to share a screen for
like the first, the next five rows behind you.
And you're just stuck with what everybody's watching on the plane.
Like that was it.
The in-flight movie today will be, Oh, okay.
I guess we're all watching the old ass dune or something.
Snakes on a plane.
Yeah.
Right.
No, it's a great choice.
Anyway, very tangential.
I think there's a, like, um, in my coworking space at four o'clock every
Friday, uh, black, uh, Rebecca black song.
It's Friday comes on.
I think that that should just be a thing for the planet.
Just at four o'clock across the planet.
Someone called Rebecca black.
I don't see why.
Yeah.
It's just, it should be the anthem for Friday at four.
Everybody just start, start wrapping up, you know, get out of here.
Four o'clock Eastern.
No, of course it can't be 1984.
Screw you, Australia.
Screw other places.
Screw other shifts.
4:00 PM Eastern.
That starts playing.
Well, thank you very much for the idea.
We will take that into consideration.
And if someone wants to have that idea for free, please Spotify product
manager who wants to get a promotion, add this feature.
It does seem like something that'd be really cool.
Like a way for me to stay connected to someone from afar.
Let's start up a queue and listen to the same music for a couple of hours.
And Russell, you're up this week.
What's up?
What do you got for us?
All right.
So I've been, uh, actually listening to more podcasts than normal and more.
This one in particular is the best, uh, just on repeat.
Yeah.
And you know, I'm starting to realize how frustrating, I just want to comment
and communicate while I'm listening to podcasts to the podcasters, right?
Like it's, I feel like we, as a podcaster myself, now I would love to have
dialogue with our listeners or whoever is talking and wants to share
something about the show, right?
We have four segments.
I just want somebody to leave a comment anywhere on our podcast.
And it, particularly if I say something terrible, I would love to see the
comment chain correcting my behavior or telling me you're going to prison.
When I talk about tax fraud.
Um, I just, I'm surprised that you see these, uh, all over the place
with YouTube having timestamps.
Uh, you have SoundCloud having comments in the bar themselves as you're listening.
Why isn't there a podcast app out there that exclusively does this, right?
I feel like it's a game changer for podcasters and for the
people listening to podcasts.
Cause how cool would it be if like your favorite podcaster comments back on
your, on your comment, like, or mentions it on the next podcast or like you
create a podcast longevity rather than the single week or day that it's released.
It's just a continuing conversation.
Um, so yeah, that's what the better podcast app, I don't have a name for it, but
that's great.
It's the social podcast.
Yeah.
That's great.
Right.
Like it's the BPA got the little like tick marks next to the progress bar.
And it has a, this person said this at this time.
Right.
Uh, now that Google podcasts is shutting down and everything's moving to YouTube,
it does seem like the natural place for that to live.
Cause there's already built in comments and there's already a podcast platform
there.
People are publishing to YouTube.
You just kind of have the comments scoot up and live up in the, uh, up in the
progress bar itself.
I think YouTube has a feature like that.
Now where you can like, when you sort comments, you can sort by like at this
point in the video, but I don't think it's like a live feed.
Yeah.
It doesn't look super great.
Like in real time, you want to see the sort of like dark souls, like Elden ring
where you've got the, like the people are not happening in real time here, but
they're leaving notes for each other at places in the thing.
Yeah.
That's great.
Yeah.
And I'm sure you can make this more social.
Like I'd love to see my friends comments or the top comments on podcasts.
Like that's where it'd be really cool.
And obviously you're not trying to like, hopefully you can make the app like very
vocal friendly, right?
Cause I feel like you're not, you're intentionally not watching your screen.
So you just feel like leave a comment or Hey podcasty, you know, let me leave a
comment at that, that point in time and it'll record your voice texts and then
there it is.
It's just done.
You still listen to your podcast.
You leave your notes.
So you're saying like Leo could, Leo recommends podcasts all the time.
Leo listens to a podcast ahead of time, leaves comments.
And then I'm generally driving when I'm listening to a podcast as Leo's voice
come on top of it, reading his comment at that particular spot.
Or you think it's speech to text.
What were you thinking?
Oh, I was thinking, I was thinking, yeah, speech to text, comment leaving, but you
just made it way cooler, Scott.
Like Leo left a comment here.
Every three seconds.
No, no, don't ask.
Just Leo just appears in the background.
Wasn't this part cool?
I've watched movies next to Leo before.
I know how it works.
I can go back in time and leave a spoiler for the next three minutes
to like, that'd be a dope.
And you could like bring up or down the levels of both of the medium and
the people who are talking.
You could prioritize your people that are in your network over the random public.
But I don't know.
I feel like some people really hate the movie theater thing.
You know, other people really like, like, can you believe it?
What are they going to do next moments?
Right.
Hmm.
That's really fun.
Yeah.
I didn't think about how you would listen or react to it.
I feel like you'd listen to the podcast and then afterwards you'd kind of like
browse through people's comments.
Right.
And see what people said about your favorite part of the podcast, where you
left comments or something.
A lot of people listen to podcasts, walking the dog, doing the dishes, driving is
huge.
So like having it actually live as native audio that people are adding to it is
really interesting.
Yeah.
I also, I feel like it makes more revenue.
Like I feel like you'd make more revenue as a podcaster because now you have
advertisements maybe built in or ads when people are looking or listening.
I don't know.
You could throw, you could put more analytics behind your podcasts.
You could have a really engaging podcast with low viewers or listenership.
And now you're like creating a better experience.
We're going to open the can of worms to this world of not Twitch streamers, but
like podcast commenters where like, I never listened to the daily, but I always
listened to the daily.
What, you know, with Stephen Colbert has comments on top of it.
That's interesting.
I was thinking about the content moderation problem.
You do have like, how do you keep the rando from just yelling Nazi, Nazi, Nazi,
Nazi over it or whatever.
You just, and your app, you'd be like, who, what comments do I want to overlay on
this one?
And you have your favorites of people that you trust that are fun, add humor or
whatever to it or additional explanations.
And we can do the Reddit model of like distributing moderation out to the
podcasters, our admins, and they can elect other moderators to down rank or hide
people who just scream whatever obscenities, you know, you could do like a
transcription and voice the text and then highlight like swear words or yeah.
Auto detect.
But I like the idea of being able to subscribe to your favorite commentators.
Yeah.
That's really cool.
Just being able to like, oh yeah, like famous comedian is being paid to do a
bunch of riffs on this, this American life.
Yeah.
It's like a watch along or like a riff tracks, you know, the mystery science
theater.
It's just, it's Riff podcast to react.
Concept.
Right.
The beauty of the podcast industry is that it's all built on like super old
technology, RSS feeds and hosted files and stuff.
And there's no one gatekeeper for it.
Right.
So like Apple doesn't choose who gets to be on the platform or not, because there
is no one place.
So this is really lucrative as a business because anyone can come in with this cool
new app and like build on top of this open ecosystem and nothing's going to shut it
down.
You know, if you want to build a really cool podcast app, then just do it.
I love that idea.
That's so fun.
Yeah.
I guess I'm, I feel like this is such an obvious one.
I feel like it exists and I just don't know where it is.
And no, it's like 95% of the way there.
YouTube's like 85%, but none of them have the, the real time community interaction
thing.
Like you're saying, all right, let's do this one.
This is the one.
This is the idea.
No, no.
You just gave it away.
That's the whole conceit of the show.
I've been given ideas away and nobody's building them.
Right.
So your time will come.
Might as well just, yeah.
We will be on a last slide in a Y Combinator pitch someday.
Someone got our, their idea from this show and now they're a trillionaire and.
There's going to be a podcast overlaid on top of us talking right now, explaining
where all our ideas went.
Here's why they're totally wrong.
Leo, tell me what's your idea this time around?
Not unrelated.
So, uh, text to speech has gotten pretty good in recent months with these AI
revolutions here and, um, things that you feed a bunch of text into can sound
pretty natural to listen to in a way that they didn't last year.
Right.
So I want to combine Wikipedia, which has interesting factoids about places.
Things are geo tagged in Wikipedia.
You can load up a map view of Wikipedia and see local areas of interest that are
like near you.
Right.
And combine that with audio.
So I want to have a personalized tour guide.
I pop in headphones while walking through the street in downtown Chicago, and it's
telling me all about, Hey, did you know that that statue over there is this people
do those audio tours in a museum, right?
Where they walk from piece to piece and the little headphone thing tells them the
pre-recorded piece.
There are trillions of interesting factoids on the internet that could be
harvested and told to me, even just as like a little background.
Hey, you're on your commute right now.
Did you know that that is a historical site over there?
And that was from world war two and blah, blah, blah.
I think that there's so much stuff around everybody who that they just don't know
about, and it could be narrated on your phone.
You've got location, you've got access to all of this content.
It's free.
Someone build a nicer interface where I don't have to like search, pull up and
read through something, but have it be a little bit more naturally presented to me.
By audio.
I like it.
It's like if AR, if we had augmented reality glasses that worked, but
radio version, so meta introduced those Ray-Bans the most recent version has like,
I'm looking at something and it says, Oh, that that's the Eiffel tower.
It's this tall, right?
It can kind of be a little bit aware of what you're looking at with a camera and
image recognition, but yeah.
But you're doing straight up GPS on here.
Sure.
I love that.
You know that I'm a couple of hundred feet from that church.
Hey, did you know that that church was actually built by the KKK?
Oh shit.
No, I didn't know that.
Or whatever.
Right.
Wikipedia.
There's got to be stuff like that.
Probably burn it down.
I don't know.
It's in a black mirror quick.
Great.
And it could even like generate little walking tours for you.
Sure.
Like here's like use the AI stuff to be like, here are 10 great places to visit in X.
And it does that.
It uses something like open street map to do the navigation.
It like navigates you turn by turn.
Yeah.
People pay a lot of money for guidance like this.
And I feel like, uh, uh, we could even build a community around it.
So I am a frequent contributor to this app and I've built a bunch of.
Here's a neat 30 minute route through five local parks and some
interesting factoids about them.
You make it like a sourced community thing.
Yeah.
That's a really good idea.
I, I, I paid when I had my work team in town or remote full remote, I ended
up paying for a walking tour.
That's 20 bucks a person.
And there's like 15 people and it's just her, it's a guided tour.
It's literally what you said is the app, but a human person doing it.
Sure.
Uh, which actually is kind of weird.
Cause we, we had some random person join our walking tour in the middle of it.
Uh, and he's like, all right, I'm just going to join this.
Right.
So it avoids that whole thing, that awkward situation.
But you would never do that just for yourself, right?
Like a walking tour of one.
You know, who was our, who was our special guest today?
I feel like this would be a perfect, we get a whole group of people and now
instead of it being a walking tour of one, it's like five people all listening
to the walking tour at the same time.
Right.
And now it's just, uh, yeah, I don't see why that can't be a thing too.
We can all leave comments at different points along the way.
GPS tagged.
Yeah.
Um, this boy, Leo said this.
There's a Nike running app too, where you can like post your runs and stuff.
You can like kind of share your, your walking tour or something.
If we got really fan like, Oh, this is my favorite tour.
You walk around this, this area.
It does seem like it would be a good exercise companion.
If you're a jogger or something, you're just going around and Hey, did you know
that that fountain over in that park over there is from this and it represents that.
And yeah.
Oh, and I bet there's like multiple, I bet you could rotate between, uh, different
factoids too, so you can, every walk is different.
Mm hmm.
It'll keep track of your history and not repeat.
And people are adding new stuff all the time to Wikipedia.
That's the beauty of it, right?
Mm hmm.
Always up to date.
Yeah.
This sort of reminds me of, so Leo knows this, but I'm a pretty avid geocacher.
And a couple of years ago they introduced something called adventure labs, which is
basically just user created walking tours.
So you can, or driving tours or boating tours.
So you pick, so you can pick five points of interests and you go to each location
and answer a little question about them.
But like, this seems like just that for the masses throw in some AI, but like
when people create walking tours who aren't just like tourism boards, really
interesting stuff results I've done, like historic school houses of the county we
live in or like covered bridges or stuff like that.
So I just think when you combine the subsets of the Venn diagram of people who
love maps with people who love other niche interests, like totally like you get the
train people on this, like, right.
There's probably a lot of local tourism boards who've built tours and interesting
fact databases and stuff like this that are just sitting locked away in a
spreadsheet somewhere.
And if they could contribute that to Wikipedia, not only could this app use it,
but then the whole world has access to that stuff.
Walkipedia.
Oh, you found it.
It is.
There it is.
Nailed it.
And that's it.
Walkipedia.
Waka waka pedia for the funny version.
Man, visitor bureaus, Leo.
I do like the idea of driving tours too.
So you can do your own like trolley experience, right.
But you're in the car.
Yeah.
Or I think this would be really cool because when you first visit, like you're
visiting a city for the first time, right.
It's really hard to like create your itinerary.
So I wonder if you take this instead of it being like an educational thing, it's
just like, hey, go on a tour with a tourist who knows the area really well.
And you kind of just drive in this area.
And now they're saying, oh, that's a really good bar at night.
Oh, that's really busy.
You don't want to go there after five.
Like literally just some person in your car telling as a local telling you what
you should and shouldn't do.
Yeah.
That's pretty good.
Yeah.
Don't go to this bar after midnight.
Or go to and go to that bar.
Right.
But you go to this one.
I, there is some value there.
I think that is missed that it outside of like maybe pulling data contributors to
walking tours, there are so many like local historian geeks that would love to
do walking tours.
Um, and you can, they can do like a sample or that could be their like freemium
version of, of their walking tour is like, yeah, download my, my walking tour.
And I got five more in the, in the oven.
You just got to call me right.
Or hell they could just be selling it, right.
You just sell different audio books for walking tours and now that are location
aware that are, yeah, right.
I want to get that knowledge out of their head and onto some publicly
scrapable thing so I could put it in an AI blender and have it, you know, magic
me, but it is, it makes sense to have this big community base too.
You get your people who are like well rated, like a good Uber driver, but a good
local tour guide.
Yeah.
It's kind of like a, yeah, like authorship, but vocally right.
You get Morgan Freeman to do the voice of your, of your tour.
And now it's like, Oh, I'll buy the $10 version.
The premium Morgan Freeman version or Snoop dog.
Like that's, that's also like have some sort of like passive mode where it's just
like random factoid mode.
So rather than like a guided tour, just have it on.
It's basically just like if you had me in the car, just being like, it's just called
saying that old building that used to be like a Meyer 50 years ago.
That's great.
I love that.
And people, so you've got your map and then people are leaving much like the
podcast comments, just notes in the area and you're, you're getting fed them
randomly and they get upvoted or downvoted.
So they are more likely to appear.
It's like yik yak sort of.
Yes.
We're on the same wavelength, dude.
Audio bullying.
It's just, we're making fun of places now because we can't make fun of people
anymore.
You're running up against some content moderation, nightmare hell rides, I think.
Oh, you could figure it out.
Eventually you can have little sliders inside the app that says how educational
do you want this versus how completely useless do you want this?
And then you can filter it, right?
Like not safe for work mode, right?
You just listen to all the hate.
That's your famous homes of adult actors.
Whoa, that would be kind of shocking.
Like our little, our sweet little town.
And you're just like, Oh wow, that happened there.
There's probably stories.
Yeah.
That are locked up in people's heads.
Getting them put out somewhere.
It'd be fun.
I could start some really mad rumors, dude.
I could start some crazy rumors.
The original Stroopwafel was launched at this home.
Yeah.
I don't know how you do fact checking at scale.
That's tough.
It gets people, it gets people on the app though.
I bet if you just put out some, just lie.
Yeah.
Everybody's going to be like, that's how next door is like alive is because people
just need to communicate the truth to these liars, right?
Like half the people on there are just correcting false information.
When neighbors start talking, good things happen.
Isn't that their slogan?
Is that what they say?
Good things happen?
Yeah.
Oh, that's, I hope that's a self-fulfilling prophecy because they need a lot of that.
You see the people on there.
God damn it, Diane, your cat's in my backyard again.
Our next door is actually pretty tame because it's just a bunch of middle aged
women selling each other lawn furniture.
In December.
Every once in a while though, like the top comment, like once a month or once every
other week, you'd just be like, Oh, that's going to start a fire up in here.
I don't know.
I kind of love the idea of being able to drive down a street and just listen to the
random neighbor arguments that are happening.
Just what's the T in this area going through?
Well, this guy freaking Frank's fence over here is encroaching on my rose bushes.
The minute that you introduce replies on the geo map, the walkopedia, oh boy.
That's when things really pop off.
It's just Godwin's law.
All right, Scott, what do you got for us this week?
It was kind of an unspoken rule for when we started this podcast.
Like let's stay, stay back from AI just because we can't just have like, here's a
cool idea.
AI is going to solve it.
It was all the rage here.
Yep.
Well, man, AI is doing some cool things to, uh, nowadays.
And one that I keep getting hung up on is chat.
GPT has there in their app.
You can upload images now.
So you take an, put an image into the app and it'll give you a full description of
what's happening there.
I took, you know, a picture of my dog last night and chat GPT, what's going on in
this image?
Oh, there's a Brown dog sitting on a couch with a yellow collar, uh, surrounded on
this color couch and it'll give you as much detail as you want on it.
So at the same time, they've also started releasing different APIs where you can
connect chat GPT to pretty much anything.
Now that they're into different apps like Zapier and whatnot, it's as easy as just
like, I want this to do this when this happens.
And so here's what I want to do.
I want to take a cheap piece of hardware, like a wise camera or just a webcam, have
it hooked up to a chat GPT API to analyze images and trigger outputs based upon what
it's seeing.
And that's it.
This is like, this is all no code.
So anyone can use this to do pretty much anything.
I can take a camera, point it at my car outside and be like, if this car moves at
any point, send me a text, turn on a light, do whatever.
But it's all based on me verbally describing something instead of having to have any
knowledge of coding whatsoever.
All with a $20 piece of hardware that plugs in over USB or whatever.
That's fun.
Dude.
Okay, Scott.
That's so it's like a stakeout.
Right.
You're like a cop staking out.
That's a good name.
The stake is like, I guess watch, just watch mode, you know, your robot, uh,
watchman, or is it more than that?
Is it like eyeball?
Like, just like you're telling command to a camera to watch for something, right?
Maybe it is just like a stakeout thing where I can, it would be the equivalent of
me having a person staring at something, letting me know when something happens.
So I'm hiring a cheap PI with a cell phone to call me when X happens.
Hmm.
See, the thing is though, those API calls, right?
You're running those every frame, every second, you know, you got to figure out
that, but yeah.
And, uh, the wise cams that you mentioned used to have an onboard machine learning
model and they'd be able to tell this as a person, this is a whatever as hardware
is getting better.
It seems like we could do like, that's true.
Google's barred now has a version that runs on phones.
That's like a small, large language model.
It seems like we're on the cusp of being able to put something just good enough
for basic, you know, image recognition onto the device itself and have it run
locally.
It's open source.
Now you can download some open source model that would probably do this job
decently well too.
So the hardware is you could, it's a couple, maybe a couple of gigs actually
to run, I don't know how much RAM you need, but it's a run an AI model and have
it watch it.
So dude, staking out, uh, certain things is cool.
Interesting.
Well, Scott, you and I at work have a problem that something like this could
solve, which is trying to count people who are moving through a space and all of
the existing solutions that have some big Achilles heel.
So if you could have a camera that's literally watching how many people have
come through, how long have they been in this?
How are they gone?
Cause it's AI.
It could track who, if you wanted it to be like, this person is hogging the
conference room.
This person's name is Derek and you're going to remember that this is Derek.
Got it.
That's Derek.
Now tell me every time Derek does something.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the kind of thing we're coming up on, right?
Oh man.
Please describe what Derek's doing to me every five minutes and then just give me
a play by play.
Yikes.
Yeah, this is get really dystopian really quick.
Keep an eye on my wife.
Don't let her leave the house.
Honestly, I'm trying to think of like not crazy, sketchy uses of this.
I'm trying to come up with a trail cam hunters.
Like great.
Awesome.
Like, like, you know, this track, this deer or like farmers keep an eye on this
cow.
If this cow starts to act weird, let me know.
Keep an eye on my pet while I'm away.
Sander, we need your positive spin on more things.
Yeah.
Pet monitor one would be great.
Whenever my pet does something really cute.
Keep it recorded.
That's a great one.
Oh, look at that.
They're sleeping on their back with their paws up in the air.
Look at that.
My camera just told me they were watching it and now they told me.
Automatically post it on Reddit.
Cute detector.
It's just like watching your dog all day and sends you cute photos of your dog.
I just have Dolly generating pictures of my dog.
Now I don't bother taking him.
Does it need to be real?
It just needs to happen.
It's all about that karma.
I'm just chasing it.
Is there a particular like thing where you wish that you could use this?
That you could use it for?
Honestly, no, I was just more excited about the fact that someone with zero coding
background could, we're getting very close to where they could be like, I want this to
do this and that's it.
If this, then that, but for anything in real time with nothing more than vocalizing
it.
I have a problem at work that this would solve.
We have a presence sensor that's working really well.
It tells us when a room is occupied or not, but the history of who is in the room and
who's not is locked in there like smart home platform ecosystem.
You have to use their bad app to get at the data and they have an API and one of the
many, many projects on my plate has been, I need to write an integration cause there's
no if this than that or Zapier for this particular smart home ecosystem to get at the
data and write to a spreadsheet every time someone comes or leaves the room to know
how often is this conference room used?
I wish that I could just take your cool camera and point it in there and say, whenever
someone is in here, write to a spreadsheet and then I have a list of how often this
room actually is being used.
Love that.
Dude, the amount of energy you would save doing that alone for like HVAC systems
turning on and off, like that's a huge, you'd make so much savings.
Like I did that for like a year.
I was doing a startup where we take presence and Google calendars and Outlook
calendars and turn on and off facilities.
So it's just like, Whoa.
Oh, I see.
Like to save heat or lights or something.
Is there no one in this building?
Turn it all off.
Oh, that's cool.
Campus of the college that I work at, I recently helped somebody retire and they were
instrumental in orchestrating the argument for why we should shut down between Christmas
and New Year's and the hundreds of thousands of dollars that it saves to not have people
plowing the sidewalks and going around and heating the buildings, like you said, and
doing all the stuff you have to do to keep a business open is enormous.
Changing the garbage cans, right?
Like all the, yeah, everything.
I love it.
Everything.
Yeah.
Right.
It's insane.
You know, but I think too, Scott, you could probably do stuff like a package, right?
Like I want to know when my dog throws up, I want to know when a bird hits my window.
Text me if it's 11 PM and I forgot to take the trash out or something for next morning
or message, Hey, did it snow more than an inch outside?
Call the plow guy to plow it at 4 AM or whatever.
Or I'm the manager of a local Best Buy.
Let me know if anyone's shoplifting in this aisle.
No, but that's a thing already.
I'm sure.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
Target is like insane about that.
They're insane about that.
Why do you know that?
No reason.
Sold phones at Target and the AP guys, like they're, they're intense people.
It's just like, I couldn't be a cop, so I'm going to be an AP guy at Target.
Literally prevention.
What is AP asset protection?
Yeah, this guy would literally like hide behind shelves, like secret with a walkie,
you know, is he turned in the corner, you know, and I'm like, dude, this is, I get
it.
Like he's stealing an Xbox 360 controller again, but like you don't have to go full
mission impossible on this, but yeah, I get it.
You're probably, your bonuses probably caught up in that.
But anyways.
Yeah, the consumer friendly version of this.
This reminds me, do you guys remember this movie, this Disney movie, the smart mom
home?
No.
Did you guys watch this?
Like, I think that was a dream you had.
No, there was a movie called Smart House, I think.
Yes.
I don't know.
It was a mom, like it turned into a mom of the home and it would trap the kids inside
and like became like, because it was so much safer in the, I don't know, it was just
like a crazy.
Smart House.
But you're saying you want to love it.
It was directed by LeVar Burton.
Guys, that freaked me out back in the day.
I don't know why.
I was just like.
We're digging into your childhood trauma now.
That was like an unreason, like for me, it was not, it wasn't supposed to be a scary
movie, but then it became one.
It was just like, I don't know, but it reminds me of that a little bit.
Like, I mean, there's but maybe not the evil version.
Just like, how do you make the good version would be just like a homekeeper.
Like, you always leave your laundry in the same damn spot.
Why don't you put a basket there?
You dummy, like, uh, is this a new laundry chute?
I just I just feel it.
I just feel like that's what I would say to myself if I was trying to take care of
myself.
Like, honestly, I would even use that just pointed at my laundry machine and be like,
let me know when my laundry is done so I could remember to freaking put it in the
dryer.
Shoot, that's a great that's a great simple example of how.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is that is staking out that stake out right there.
Like, watch this thing and make it tell me when it's when you see a light turn green
here.
Yeah.
And you don't have to use fancy sensors and connect it to a microcomputer and all
that stuff.
It just can like look at it.
Yeah.
Tell me when this paint is dry.
It's just watching paint dry.
That's why robots are going to overthrow us out of anger and boredom.
I feel like there's other areas where you're like watching something like when when are
you in life just like waiting for the microwave?
Well, I mean, they got the ding right?
Like, when are you just.
Yeah, but I mean, like everybody like watches their microwave the last 30 seconds.
I feel like that's just a proverbial pot boiling.
Yes, that's not a bad idea.
Like the chef.
Yeah.
Right.
Just like helping you go while you're cooking.
Like those noodles look done.
Is this done?
Hold it up to camera.
Is this golden brown?
Keep an eye on these.
Dude, put it in an oven.
It'll tell you like, oh, you're getting close.
Pizza's almost done because even if you set the time right, you know, give it some
physical hardware to give it a temperature sensor, but it can also look at it.
An oven one's a cool idea.
Yes.
Oh yeah.
It you don't have to connect anything to it.
It can just visually read a temperature sensor that's in there.
They can prove the smart fridge.
Put it in your fridge and forget about it.
And then when you're at the store, you can say, how much milk did I have left?
Yes.
This is the appliance.
This is for appliances, Scott.
This is, this is where you go with this.
This might be for appliances.
It's totally okay.
Totally not dystopian.
And it's just like smart, like make you a better cook.
Maintain your fridge better.
Right?
You got moldy cheese in your drawer.
I'm looking at it like the camera's telling you.
Clean out your thing.
It's green, right?
It's just, there's a Coke can in the back of your fridge.
You know, you should probably pick that up and move it.
Right?
This is like the stupid shit.
Expired three years ago.
Yeah.
The amount of savings.
I feel like just throwing out the jars in your fridge drawer, like cabinet.
Yes.
That's for her $20 webcam.
You fire up the app and you look at it and it's highlighted the four things in
your fridge door that expired this week.
Oh man.
It tracks when you put them in there.
Yeah.
So be like eight days ago on that Alfredo sauce, time to go.
All right.
Let me go through and I'm checking off.
Where is it here?
For fridges.
Uh, fridge pressure pads plus cameras.
Check.
That was on my list of things to talk about someday.
I'm seriously after this, going to take a picture of my fridge with chat, GPT
and be like, just describe what's in here.
Tell me what you see.
And I want to see what it can come up with.
Oh, you pointed out there and you say, here's the three shelves that I have.
Here's what's in my cabinet.
What are some novel recipes I could make with all this stuff?
Oh yeah.
Love that.
What do I, what can I make for dinner tonight that I probably haven't heard of?
You could make a pizza out of ketchup instead of pizza sauce.
No, come on.
It's a robot taste bud.
Right.
All right, Sander.
What do you got?
All right.
So this is sort of related to Leo's, I guess, as a college student, I frequently
witness freshmen year after year.
Now that I'm a scene here doing the same things that freshmen just always do.
And because they don't know better.
And so I was thinking, so there's sort of the big umbrella and then a
specific idea that inspired it.
Some sort of app to help new college students where you can like, just have
all of these little things and it's sort of location based.
So as you walk up to things, it'll be like, you don't need to put in your
door code for the dining hall door.
You could just tap your ID.
But what this was sort of inspired by, so there's sort of all these
other things inspired by that.
But the sort of core concept was.
There's a bunch of great things for driving directions.
And even maybe walking directions, but not for the specific environment of
navigating a college campus, because even on our small college campus, people take
the craziest routes between buildings because they don't know better.
So some sort of app where you can plug in your, your class, your next class, how
long you have to get to your, and you just sort of hold it up and it will just
sort of direct you cut through this building, go up these stairs, don't turn
this way to like help you navigate.
And this could even be used for like big office complexes.
Oh no, my meeting ran long and now I've got to get to the executive wing.
How do I do that?
So like core idea, some sort of fancy navigation, secondary idea, just general.
Platform that exists somewhere in between an official thing and like, yeah.
Cause like college sponsored, get to know the campus app seems
like it'd be wildly uncool.
Yeah.
But like spin that in a cool, more helpful crowdsourced way.
So like, it's still fun, but not like totally mean.
And it has like all of the functionality to be helpful.
Like if there's a club, it can be like, Oh yeah, we're in this room.
Click a button.
Here's how to get there.
Because there are always those places that no one has ever heard about.
Once Leo and I, a couple of summers ago and during an installation project
discovered a classroom that we had never heard of.
We didn't know where it was.
We had to ask five people where it was.
So like something like that.
I was a student for four years.
You guys were as well.
And then I worked there for 10 years and I'd never heard of this room in a
building I've been in hundreds of times.
Yeah.
Leo that classroom burned down 40 years ago.
I just keep envisioning if you have an app that tells you how long it gets
from this point to this point or the fastest way to get from this point to
this point, people are going to take that as a challenge and all of a sudden
you're going to have an app of being like, I can get from classroom 313 in
this building to 414 in that building in under five minutes and 42 seconds.
And they are just sprinting, finding the absolute optimal path.
That's how you make it fun.
And then you have a racing app.
It's just like everybody racing each other.
And finding better routes.
Right.
That's the only way to win.
What is the best possible route to go from here to here?
That's a fun idea.
But then you're going to see kids like jumping through windows.
Crazy.
Hey, it is the fastest route.
You know, it's just.
But I still have a leaderboard, but I like this because we, again, it's a very
small campus, but people still complain about how long it takes to get everywhere.
And I think half of it is just people don't realize how they can optimize their
routes because they're always walking down the sidewalks and like around buildings.
And it's like, you can save so much time if you just use the other set of stairs.
Right.
Cut through this building.
And especially that's only multiplied on enormous state school campuses.
And I feel like that just makes the introductory college experience so much
better if you don't always feel lost.
And guided by an upperclassman, it helps build some community to them.
Yeah.
Voiced by Morgan Freeman in your ear.
Google maps has a transit mode that you're describing, but for walking
directions, you hold it up.
It does like augmented reality.
So you see your, your, you know, what your camera is actually seeing, but with
signs overlaid and dotted lines and stuff on the sidewalk.
So building that, but it's not good at indoor stuff yet.
So yeah.
Yeah.
Getting your campus mapped onto the room number and then having that be the actual
thing built with class schedules and stuff sounds awesome.
And also like having it take into account busy times and places, like suggest times
to go to the dining hall or something just like general, like campus companion.
That's like helpful, but it's not like too like boring and official.
Like the college that I attend and work at and Leo works at has a online map, but
it's not very like useful as an active thing to use.
It's just a digital version of like a fold out brochure map.
But like, if that's like a dynamic, it has like Google has now where it's like,
Oh, this is busy now.
Like helping building a mapping and communication application specific to the
needs of a large workplace campus or college, I feel like is a market.
I think this applies to like so many, it's like the, like Google maps doesn't do well
on the last, I don't know, you know how they say the last mile, but this is like
the last hundred, 200 feet.
Like I work in a coworking space and the hardest part is to where in downtown
Holland do I go to get to this location?
It's you have to go to this hallway, go up this elevator and now you're there.
And it's like, Whoa, but that happens like dentist's office and like even small
little like strip malls.
You're like, where the hell is my orthopedic surgeon?
Like I gotta figure out which, which suite number in this building is where I got to
go.
It's just the last 30 seconds that are stressful and turn it into.
Hospital complexes.
That's another one where it's just like sort of removes the whole like follow the
green line, you know?
Yeah, absolutely.
And they tried to solve this with Bluetooth beacons a while back, but it didn't really
catch on.
Like the dream was you'd go into your Apple store or Abercrombie and you're walking
around and it's saying like this table is the sale and your phone is alerting you as
you go around from place to place because it's within X number of feet from the
beacon that is that grocery store.
This would be.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah, right.
Oh yes.
I was just thinking that I pull up cucumbers and it dot lines all the way to
where those are on the shelf.
I know people who avoid shopping at large supermarkets, even though they're so much
cheaper just because target is so much smaller and easier to find stuff and they
would shop at Meijer or Walmart if they just knew how to get around.
Like I'm thinking of one friend in particular who shopped at Meijer local
Midwestern's big supermarket chain once with me and she was like, wow, this is so
great, but I would never do this on my own because you just know where everything is.
So like, yeah, solving that problem.
Shipping.
True.
Do those apps where you can order groceries like you're essentially door dashing or
grubhubbing groceries to your home.
Do they those apps must have like efficiencies for the yeah, stickers on them,
right?
Like they do.
And the local grocery store app used to tell you exactly where it was on a map.
But I think once in a while it was inaccurate or something.
And now it only tells you the aisle, which I don't know is a major step back.
And like, oh, here we go.
Routing efficiency.
So like going back to my geocaching thing, there is a geocaching application that you
can like plug in all the different caches you want to get in a like optimize it for
driving or biking or walking.
Do that with groceries.
Put in your shopping list.
Yes, it draws out the route.
Guys, I this would be the most satisfying experience ever.
Like I hate doubling back all the way across the store.
Could put your phone holder on your cart just like it tells you where to stop.
And it's like you don't even have to stop moving.
Just like yes, and your wheels that you're pushing are generating phone charge.
I literally rewrite my wife's shopping list sometimes to like organize it by section
and order because you're just I'm like, sure, is your old dairy.
Yeah, there's no it's like I can't even fathom why she would write it this way.
It's like so frustrating to me.
Like, why would you put butter last?
Like I get your thought process, but like you put butter and then milk on the complete
other side of this list.
You're like, are you trying to kill me?
Like, just kill me now.
Just trying to get you to take extra steps, man.
That's right.
OK, another here's I will never.
I stopped like grocery stores killed me by finding ice cream cones.
OK, what aisle do you go to find ice cream cones?
Not the freezer section.
Right. Where is the ice cream cones?
Not the bread.
Right. Baking bread, baking.
There's only so many freezers in a grocery store in a freezer.
Right. The ice cream cones.
Where do you go? Just a cone with no ice.
Oh, I see.
I mean, every and every grocery store has a different aisle.
And it's just like, do I just go in the ice cream aisle and hope to God there's ice
cream cones there?
No, it's just good luck.
Like there are just some things that don't they just don't have a place in the store.
And you just throw them on the ground.
Yes. I had a similar experience finding finding Q-tips in a Walgreens once.
I spent like 20 minutes in a Walgreens looking.
I was Googling.
I was on like our slash Walgreens.
Where do people?
Just because there's sometimes these things that defy categorization.
So it's just like, yeah, you do it in a walk.
Yeah, I was just like, is it a man named like like what is this associated with?
Am I associating this with ears, face, skin?
Like, yeah, cleaning products.
It's next to the Windex.
Turns out it's in makeup.
It's just in makeup.
It's just that's where it belongs now.
Yeah. And it's like on a weird end cap or something.
So I feel like that's great.
This just solves all sorts of problems for like looking for things inside where it's
like it's too small scale for mapping applications generally to care about.
Or it's like it does that thing when you type in the name of a store or a place and
Google Maps just decides that the best place for that is the middle of the building it's
in. So it just like puts you on completely the wrong street.
And then you're just like driving around the block trying to find where the heck the
parking garage is like.
Yes.
Something to bridge that gap.
Dude. Yes.
So you guys are use.
Oh, you guys are all Android users, I'm guessing.
Sorry.
I'm an avid Android user before I got blue bubbled, bullied to death.
But share the wealth, I guess.
Sorry. No air tags like have this awesome feature.
Like you have an air tag.
Yeah, it's you literally like I have it in my stroller when I'm at Disney World and it
helps me find my stroller in the literally sea of strollers.
It tells you how many feet, what direction it's in.
That amplified, right.
Just air tags all over the store or versions of ice cream cones.
Twelve feet that way.
No, Leo, don't.
You're that's a you're bringing up past trauma.
Oh, no, it's just like I got to talk to your therapist first.
Yeah, I get it. The amount of hours I've spent in a grocery store finding shit that I
can't find. I'm sorry.
I just like, yes, same.
Yeah, it's one of the reasons I started shopping at Aldi.
Yeah, not just the price, but also just like the amount of time it takes to like develop
your routine in an enormous grocery store.
Like it's just so easy when you can just have your little 30 minute route and not when
you have to spend 40 minutes looking for what aisle they put Q-tips or deodorant or
whatever. Here's another I'm going to flip this idea a little bit, because I think, say,
like what if you were running a meeting and you could like let everybody know how far
away you were and you can like, oh, right.
Like in corporate environments like, oh, this guy's going to be late on your Google
calendar invite, like estimate of how far away I am.
Like it'll be like automatic message.
I'm running late.
I am at and because it's like local, it's like I'm in this building like.
Or you just look at the Google calendar event attendees.
There's three people here.
They've got little checks.
One of them says hasn't left last meeting seven minutes away in that building.
And one of them says, you know, walking now two minutes out.
Yeah, I'd be sweet.
Optimize your meetings.
Those extra minutes are like that one extra email.
Like there's no way in hell anyone over 30 is going to turn that on with Big Brother
scaries. But that's an awesome idea.
It's a corporate it's you know, you put it on your RFID tags and you turn it into
something like that. And now you have it being not so.
Yeah. It would know when you get into buildings.
Picks meeting locations.
Sure. Automatically based on where everyone is before.
It's like here's which building you should meet in.
If you're in four different buildings.
Google Workspace does that for just like locations of where you've assigned where you
work. So if you try to meet with someone else, it'll say, oh, here's a space.
If you've uploaded all your spaces in the Google Workspace, here's one that's halfway
between you two. But it doesn't take into account other meetings and stuff.
That's a great idea.
Like here's the optimal place in the optimal like time of day.
Yeah, that's actually incredible because like it's really hard to find a right the
right conference room.
Right. Like just don't pick it.
Don't pick where the Internet will pick for you.
Right. And going back to sort of where this started, incorporate this into our college
has like a schedule planning thing.
You like pick all the classes you want and like optimize sections based on how you want
your schedule to be. Throw in this whole location thing.
Because it's great when like it'll give you a really good schedule time wise, but it'll
just have like you go from building a to building B across campus back to building a
it's like incorporate that back into the college aspect.
Be like, here's a schedule that optimizes your trip across campus.
Say, oh, I want to have lunch at this time.
So like it'll be near the dining hall or whatever.
So totally.
Dang, Leo, your previous idea would work really well for walking tours in college
campuses, by the way.
I was thinking about that.
Yeah. A-Secrets.
Yeah.
Self-guided.
Not every high schooler wants to like sign up through the admissions office to go on
the special tour with the student guiding and all that.
They just maybe download the college app and pop in their headphones and learn about
how things work here.
Yeah. Different majors could have different professors and you could have different
things.
It seems so obvious that I do wonder if somebody's already done this.
So I don't know.
Right in. Podcasts, I spent all that show.
If you know that somebody's already done this.
In my very, very cursory Googling, I didn't see anything like it.
Or comment on Super Podcast, the app that lets you comment while you listen.
Podcasts, but better.
Well, thank you all for listening on Super Podcasts.
I hope you enjoyed yourself.
Make sure you leave a comment at this moment in the timestamp.
And thank you, Xander, very much for being here.
This is a lot of fun.
Thank you.
Pleasure.
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